7424 research outputs found
Sort by
AI-Powered Inspection: A Computer Vision System for Efficient Defects Detection in Underground Infrastructures
Get PDFUndetected defects in culverts and sewer pipes pose significant risks to public safety, leading to infrastructure collapses, flooding, and transportation disruptions. Traditional manual inspections are time-consuming, costly, and prone to human error, while existing automated methods struggle with occlusions, irregular defect shapes, class imbalances, and high computational demands. To address these challenges, this dissertation develops advanced semantic segmentation systems that automate defect detection, significantly improving efficiency and accuracy.
This research introduces a series of innovative models designed to overcome these challenges in underground infrastructure inspection. Using dual-attentive mechanisms, sparsely connected blocks, and depth-separable convolutions, these models improve segmentation performance and effectively handle data imbalances and variations in object characteristics. A key advancement is the Asymmetric Network, which optimizes the traditional encoder-decoder architecture by employing a more efficient decoder for upsampling and reconstruction. This approach reduces model complexity and computational costs while maintaining high accuracy. As a result, the proposed system accelerates both training and inference, reducing inspection time by up to 80\% and generating significant cost savings, making it ideal for resource-constrained environments.
This dissertation lays the groundwork for future research in adapting deep learning models to real-time inspection scenarios, integrating multi-modal data sources, and improving model generalization across various infrastructure types. At the same time, it delivers a practical, high-performing solution for automated infrastructure inspection, advancing defect detection and offering real-world value for municipalities, engineers, maintenance teams, and public works departments
Re-Imagining Education for English Language Learners: How Educational Leaders Meet Diverse Students\u27 Needs
Get PDFEnglish Language Learners are the fastest growing group of students in the U.S. School leaders understanding and decisions influence the programs or services provided to ELL’s (Mavrogordato & White, 2020; DeMatthews, & Tarlau, 2019). Educators and educational leader’s attitudes, perceptions, and understandings of these students impact their learning (Murphy & Torff, 2018; & Garcia et al., 2019). The purpose of this narrative qualitative research study (Riessman, 2008; Arnault & Sinko, 2021) is to examine and understand educational leadership decisions as it pertains to English Language Learners. The research setting and context for the study are education, educational leaders, elementary schools, and ELL students. This study will explore, observe, and try to understand experiences through the words of the participants, documentation, and observations frequently used in qualitative studies. This study uses educational leaders for social justice and culturally relevant pedagogy as theoretical frameworks to understand better how educational leaders implement practices for social justice and culturally relevant pedagogy as it pertains to ELL’s (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Bogotch, 2014). This study seeks an answer to the question: How do school and instructional leaders address academic, cultural, and social and emotional needs of their ELL population
“The Devil’s Dance Dens” of the Crescent City: Female Lives and Labor in the Taxi Dancing Halls of 1920s New Orleans.
Get PDFIn 1924, the taxi-dancing women of the Danceland dance hall in New Orleans, appeared at City Hall to protest its recent closure, to fight for their jobs and the lucrative wages that came with them. In the eyes of moral reformers, civic elites, and the press, the women who danced there and the work they did, were immoral and nuisance. This thesis demonstrates how these working women belied the stereotypes of helpless victim, wayward woman and gold-digging vamp so common in popular culture. Instead, they earned above average wages for working-class women, supported parents and children, and built a network of solidarity that gave them a collective voice when their livelihoods were under threat. Using newspapers, census data, maps, and the records of reformers and scholars of the time, the thesis introduces the under-explored area of research of dancing women’s labor and lifestyle, into the narrative of New Orleans’ jazz age
The Camera’s Sanctuary: Photographing the Queer Gardens of the Vieux Carré
Get PDFThis thesis explores the French Quarter courtyard as a site of queer sanctuary, memory, and community through a lens-based artistic practice. Drawing on historical and contemporary photographs, installations, and collaborations with friends and community members, the work examines how gardens and courtyards have long functioned as both physical and metaphysical spaces of refuge for the queer community in New Orleans. The project is grounded in both archival recovery and contemporary practice, combining the still image with sculptural installations that reframe the visual vernacular of gay clubs within these historic spaces. By slowing down the photographic process and attuning to both the private and public histories within each courtyard, I seek to honor the complexity of these spaces as sites of sanctuary. Ultimately, this work contributes to a living queer archive—one rooted in place, guided by care, and shaped by the ongoing relationship between image-making, memory, and community
What Love Left: A Memoir
Get PDFWhat Love Left: A Memoir is a collection of creative nonfiction essays and poems that explore the lifelong impact of grief following the death of my older brother when I was just two years old. The collection is divided into four sections—The Child, The Family, The Self, and The World, which shows how such an early loss can form identity, memory, relationships, and views on the world. Through lyrical language, raw character development, and intimate reflections, this memoir shows what grief leaves behind, how it lives inside me, and how storytelling has become a form of survival and preservation.
This memoir was formed, not from the need to resolve grief, but to survive within it. The essays reflect what was lost while continuing to discover what can be found through writing. Ultimately, What Love Left: A Memoir is a personal exploration of how destabilizing pain can ultimately become something that helps carry us forward
National Mythmaking in the Valley of Vapors: Imperial Memory at Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1890-1926
Get PDFThough it is situated in the geographic South, the town of Hot Springs, Arkansas embraced the narratives of the western frontier of the United States during its development as a tourist destination in the early twentieth century. White business proprietors in Hot Springs claimed that Indigenous tribes in the area had worshipped the thermal waters and led the Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto to the springs during his sixteenth-century exploration of the region. Though these narratives were historically unfounded, the story of De Soto’s early colonial endeavors in Arkansas became embedded in the landscape of Hot Springs in a re-imagining of history that commodified Indigenous culture and celebrated colonial attitudes. This thesis explores how and why Hot Springs developed in this way during this period and argues that these myths were intentionally created by business owners in Hot Springs to attract tourism by assuaging national anxieties about the closure of the United States Western frontier. These marketing techniques framed Hot Springs and its natural resources as a frontier space, and the association of the town with the early Spanish American empire connected Hot Springs to a broader legacy of European imperialism and conquest
Sustainability Reporting, Global Uncertainty, Cost of Capital and Firm Performance: The Case of Global Energy Industry
Get PDFThis study examines the impact of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) performance on financial metrics within the energy sector, focusing on cost of capital and firm performance, with moderating factors such as the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) and Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI). The first study investigates how ESG performance affects the cost of capital measured as weighted average cost of capital (WACC), cost of equity, and cost of debt in energy firms. Using ordinary least squares regressions and longitudinal data from the LSEG database, findings reveal that higher ESG scores, including individual pillar performance (Environmental, Social, Governance), consistently reduce all three cost-of-capital measures. The WUI significantly moderates this relationship, amplifying ESG’s cost-lowering effect amid global uncertainty, offering energy managers a pathway to optimize capital structure while enhancing sustainability. The second study explores ESG’s impact on firm performance proxied by return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), and earnings per share (EPS), across 700 energy firms from 2007–2023, analyzed through panel regression. Results indicate that robust ESG practices, particularly the Social Pillar (e.g., employee relations), strongly enhance ROA and ROE, while the Environmental Pillar drives EPS, underscoring the financial benefits of sustainable practices. Midstream and Downstream energy sectors show the strongest ESG performance links, with the CVI revealing that climate-vulnerable firms with high ESG scores maintain profitability during environmental stress. Collectively, these findings highlight ESG’s transformative potential in reducing financing costs and boosting performance, moderated by uncertainty and climate risks. For practitioners, integrating ESG offers a dual benefit of financial efficiency and resilience, while policymakers can leverage these insights to strengthen ESG reporting and address climate vulnerabilities like biodiversity loss and extreme weather. This research bridges gaps in ESG literature, emphasizing its critical role in shaping energy sector stability and sustainability
English Literacy Instruction in the Early Elementary Years: An Ecological Grounded Theory of Teacher Decision Making in American Jewish Day Schools
Get PDFJewish Day Schools are mission-driven institutions tasked with providing both secular and Judaic education, ensuring the survival of Jewish faith and culture while teaching general academic subjects. Teachers in these schools face the challenge of balancing the need to foster Jewish culture with the requirement to provide a complete secular education, including foundational literacy skills in English for early elementary students. With limited time dedicated to general studies, teachers must make complex decisions about curriculum priorities. This grounded theory study explored how general studies teachers in early elementary grades (kindergarten through third grade) at American Jewish Day Schools decide on strategies for teaching English literacy. The study used semi-structured interviews with teachers and constant comparative analysis of the data, which led to the development of The Interactive Bioecological Decision-Making Model. This grounded theory includes five stages: defaulting to the SELF, acquiring and assimilating the WHAT, acquiring and assimilating the HOW, meeting the needs of students, and the Ultimate WHY, along with limitations, challenges, and mandates. The study suggests that educators and administrators should develop a more intentional and comprehensive literacy curriculum that equips students with essential reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. Such an approach will support students’ identity development and academic success and help Jewish Day Schools attract and retain a more substantial student body, ensuring their long-term viability
Oral History Interview with Ben Zucker (Part 1)
No full textBen Zucker is the co-director of Step Up Louisiana, an economic justice organization based in New Orleans. He grew up in a family of union organizers, with both of his parents involved in labor activism. Zucker was exposed to this work from a young age and continued his involvement in social justice movements as a student at Tulane University, where he supported campus workers\u27 efforts to unionize. After graduating, Zucker worked on the Fight for 15 campaign, organizing fast food workers across the country, before returning to New Orleans to co-found Step Up Louisiana.https://scholarworks.uno.edu/ejrloh/1003/thumbnail.jp
Oral History Interview with Lloyd Robinson
No full textMr. Lloyd Robinson Jr. was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on June 13, 1952. He was raised in a working-class family with a background in skilled trades. He experienced the integration of public schools at Abramson High School in the late 1960s. After briefly studying at Xavier University, he entered an apprenticeship program and became a pipefitter with Local 60, a career he pursued for many years, even working internationally in Algeria. Mr. Robinson was a key figure in the founding of the People\u27s Institute for Survival and Beyond, a nationally recognized anti-racism organization, and served as the president of its board. His expertise lies at the intersection of labor unionism, grassroots community organizing, and anti-racism analysis.https://scholarworks.uno.edu/ejrloh/1019/thumbnail.jp